It’s entirely possible that this is not a foreign influence campaign. Perhaps there’s a group here that is simply anti-American as its primary interest, and passionately so to upvote each other.
On the other hand, one should not discount the value of HN as tastemaker and trendsetter. Also, it would be fairly easy to run bots here. I wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.
I would encourage dedicated readers here to aggressively and persistently discount the value of HN as a tastemaker and trendsetter.
HN is actually a trailing indicator on tastes and trends, essentially by design. Things only make it to the front page if they get submitted and voted upward by a large number of people. That means it’s all stuff that is public and seems cool to a bunch of random people browsing a website. Not exactly cutting edge.
Basically every community, online or not, over-indexes on its own importance. Like how random small towns can get so worried about international terrorists targeting them. To folks who love HN, of course the great forces of the world would be attracted to compete here. Look how obviously awesome it is, right?
Paul Graham said HN was set up on the theory that it would efficiently surface great ideas and entrepreneurs for Ycombinator. Needless to say, that did not pan out. (How often do you see PG or any YC leadership here anymore?) Honestly I am mystified as to why YC continues to operate it at all.
> AI X/Twitter — a few hundred accounts effectively set the narrative in the first 24 hours; vibe checks here outrun benchmarks.
> r/LocalLLaMA — the open-weights kingmaker; a model that fails here doesn't get quantized, and unquantized means unadopted.
> Hacker News, and increasingly YouTube/Discord for the practitioner layer.
Source: https://pellmell.ai/s/aefaa217b57ed50be9e2a4b8c9f3173e
For a brief moment the readership of HN heavily overlapped with founders in Silicon Valley, and for those years HN was indeed a platform that acted as a trendsetter or tastemaker. That time has long passed. Twitter is the closest to this today, which is on that that list, and makes it a decent place to listen. r/LocaLLaMa is not bad as a support forum for GGUF and quantizer projects but it's at the level of "Windows tutorial" of software from the '90s.
If anyone is interested in being at the "edge" of this, I suggest simply going to meetups in tech hubs where people are working with AI and models. My guess is any city with a major tech presence will have more "edge" than HN. I'm fortunate enough to be in Silicon Valley right now and have friends who work at foundational lab companies so it's not hard to stay on top of what's happening. The "internet" of 2026 is just much, much bigger than the internet of 2007 when HN was founded, and so it's just a lot harder to find the information that you need.
> wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.
It's much easier to buy politicians in US, e.g. Elon bought POTUS for ~200M, Anthropic revenue is 40B, imagine what they can do
Why not "OpenAI used simplified chinese to create a fake prc-origin campaign and media buzz to convince the public they actually love data-centers and anti-datacenter sentiment is a psyop" there's an equal amount of proof provided for either scenario.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/aug/10/indonesia-clic...
https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/political-post-real-or-m...
Considering this site has international users, it's not hard to find this, especially right now. Hell, Canada is in this group currently.
We've never been the shining beacon of light we would claim to be, but we're so fucking awful now.
Could you expand on what you mean by being "currently anti-American"?
I believe that many Americans that were previously dismissive or ambivalent regarding critiques of US activity at home and abroad (either due to patriotism, realpolitik apologia, or general naïveté) are now re-evaluating some of the beliefs they hold about their country in light of the chronic political dysfunction and an absolutely breathtaking extent of corruption being perpetrated in broad daylight today (as well as indications that extensive corruption has long festered among our elite class, surfaced via the Epstein revelations).
I don't know, just asking.
But I know that in my own upbringing I've always viewed America as a place where, because it's a democracy, we are never going to all be aligned or on the same page about policy direction. Even when I disagree with the Biden Administration or the Trump Administration on some number of issues, and believe my I've got a lot of those issues with the current one, I wouldn't think of myself as anti-American or wishing harm to the country. But that's just my own experience.
I am very pro the "dream" of America, in terms of liberty, democracy, etc. According to every "democracy index" I'm aware of we're not doing so hot in that regard, generally rating as a flawed/deficient democracy and the trends are going in the wrong direction, fast.
> Do you want our businesses and factories to shut down and go out of business?
Generally, no, but this is way too open-ended of a question. I want good economic opportunity for everyone, including every US citizen. But relevant to the OP if Meta got snapped out of existence I think it would be a net positive for the world.
> Are you willing or would you support foreign countries attacking our military at home and abroad?
Nope. But across our entire history ask yourself how many foreign countries have attacked the US? Now ask yourself how many the US has attacked. With those numbers in mind, does the US seem like "the good guys"? really? ...really?
> Are you cheering against our athletes?
Nope, but I'm not cheering for them either just because they are American, I'm not a tribalist.
Well, to be fair people do have different dreams. I'm not sure those indices count for a whole lot. As an example, folks who argue in favor of returning more power to the individual states are, certainly, acting in accordance with stronger democratic principles. I'd argue the EU is actually a bit anti-democratic as it removes more power from local populations and individual states/countries/entities. Yet how would individual democracy indices rate these two?
And if you disagree with my perspective on what is more democratic, well, who is right and who is wrong?
> Generally, no, but this is way too open-ended of a question. I want good economic opportunity for everyone, including every US citizen. But relevant to the OP if Meta got snapped out of existence I think it would be a net positive for the world.
I'm no fan of Meta. But they aren't the only entity where if they snapped out of existence it would be a net positive for the world. I can think of a few non-corporate entities at least.
But fair enough it's a bit open-ended. I guess if push comes to shove when you say you are anti-American do you want to see, for example, economic opportunity increase in other countries at the expense of Americans? Not all relations have to be such give-and-take, but certainly many economic opportunities are. I'm just trying to learn more about what being an anti-american means to you.
> Nope. But across our entire history ask yourself how many foreign countries have attacked the US? Now ask yourself how many the US has attacked. With those numbers in mind, does the US seem like "the good guys"? really? ...really?
I'm fine doing things like removing all of our overseas bases, leaving alliances including NATO, never again being involved in the affairs of other countries, whether that's Korea (Korean War), Kuwait, Bosnia, or Iran, or Taiwan and China, and cutting our military spending quite a bit to reflect your desire to not be the bad guys anymore. I say let's just sit back and let the rest of the world figure out their problems - why do we need to be involved?
Is that something you agree with as well? Would that be anti-American in alignment with your views or is there other nuance here I'm not properly capturing?
> Nope, but I'm not cheering for them either just because they are American, I'm not a tribalist.
And to be clear even if America was even, say, your ideal dream since you're not a tribalist you wouldn't cheer on American athletes and would also label (not as a matter of insult but as fact) other people who cheer on their compatriots as tribalist?
I only care about the content of someone's character and how their actions impact the rest of the world, not the country they happen to be a citizen of, a fact which for non-immigrants (the vast majority of people) is completely random happenstance.
If already wealthy foreign agents become wealthier at the expense of impoverished Americans, I find that to be unfortunate. If already wealthy Americans become wealthier at the expense of impoverished non-Americans, I find that to be just as unfortunate.
I'm not going to cheer someone (athlete, business leader, or otherwise) on just because they are American. The fact that they are American is as irrelevant to me as the color of their eyes.
Do they seem to be a good person who treats others well? If yes, I will cheer for that person, whether they are American or not. Do they seem like an entitled asshole that treats others poorly? If yes, I will cheer against that person, whether they are American or not.
And the reason I currently label myself anti-America is that I believe that collectively we are the entitled asshole that treats others poorly. And we can't just pawn that off on Trump to be the scapegoat. He didn't materialize out of nowhere. We elected him. Twice. The second time after a failed insurrection. We have collective culpability.
I applaud your openness to speak. I've traveled/interacted with many nationalities, and very rarely I come across someone who is open/rational enough to openly state their dislike of their country and denouncing their history.
I wish you the best in life, smart internet stranger!
Being pro a group can be strictly positive sum - wanting to lift that group up, likely because you consider yourself part of it or on the same team. It's possible your intentions are bad, but they certainly don't have to be.
Being anti a specific group is inherently negative. Perhaps they deserve it, but that requires justification in a way simply being positive does not.